A new industry study just put a number on something a lot of local business owners have suspected but couldn't prove: when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for a recommendation, some businesses get named again and again, and others almost never come up. The gap between the two groups isn't luck. It's a pattern you can copy.
The Study Behind the Numbers
SOCi, a marketing platform that works with multi-location brands, compared eight growing restaurant chains against eight shrinking ones using a composite score they call the Local Visibility Index, which measures performance across search, reviews, social, and AI recommendations. The businesses aren't limited to restaurants in principle: the same channels (Google, Yelp, Bing, ChatGPT, and the rest) decide whether any local business or service-area business gets found, whether that's a plumber in Aurora or a law firm serving all of Colorado.
What Separates the Winners
The results lined up across every channel they measured. Growing brands showed up in Google's local 3-Pack for 35.3% of searches compared to 14.4% for shrinking brands, carried higher star ratings, and responded to 72.4% of their reviews versus 43.6% for the businesses losing ground. But the widest gap was in AI: growing brands were recommended by tools like ChatGPT about 20% of the time versus just 3%, a 6 to 7 times difference that held up across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity alike.
The businesses winning in AI search aren't doing anything exotic, they're just consistently accurate and responsive everywhere at once, which is exactly what these AI tools are trying to reward when they decide who to recommend.
Copying What the Growing Brands Did
Check that your business name, address, phone number, hours, and category match exactly across Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Bing. Mismatches are exactly what erode the trust these AI tools are trying to measure.
Respond to every review, good and bad. Response rate tracked almost as closely with growth as the ratings themselves did.
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini to describe your business today. Whatever it gets wrong is a gap in your online presence worth fixing.
Keep new reviews coming in. A thin or aging review profile quietly signals to both people and AI tools that a business may not be active.
Treat your online presence as one connected system, not four separate to-do lists for your website, listings, reviews, and social profiles.
A big budget or a dedicated marketing team was not what separated the two groups in this study. Consistency across every place a customer or an AI tool might look was, and the businesses that had it were the ones growing.
Further reading: What 120,000 AI Recommendations Reveal About Getting Found by ChatGPT and Gemini
PeaksLocal is a specialized online identity firm dedicated to helping local businesses navigate and dominate the optimization process, serving Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs and businesses nationwide.
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